Friday Blog 220 - Last Blog Before Beta - First Images Of New Terrain
Work-in-progress terrain rendered with the new system
In the past month, Zun has made major progress on the new terrain generation! It uses a fundamentally new design philosophy.
In 2017, we released CS with arctic areas in the north and tropical areas in the south. We wanted to give players the opportunity to settle themselves in a different looking area. We did want to give players a large temperate area to find the ideal spot for their colony, so the distance you’ve got to travel before finding another biome is pretty huge.
In 2019, we wanted to make these distant biomes useful for gameplay. We added the multiple colonies feature, and unique resources per biome. We liked the idea, but it was disappointing in practice. Travelling and trading between colonies is very tedious, and the rewards aren’t worth it.
0.9.0 fixes that core problem by adding outposts, which are like new colonies, except that their stockpile is merged with the main colony. This makes it a lot easier to set them up and to benefit from their unique products.
More from the new terrain generator
Instead of demanding that players travel huge distances to distant biomes, we’re now reworking the world to have more variety in the spawn biome. Instead of having random patches of arctic and tropic intermingling, the spawn biome is now intended to be mostly temperate, interspersed by fens and heaths. These fens and heaths contain unique and valuable resources. Some ores are only available at mountain tops.
It’s basically the same ideas as 0.7.0, but the barriers are a lot lower, and the rewards aren’t just some relatively useless endgame items - the rewards are now a core part of the tech tree.
Fundamental changes to the world generation are pretty much always breaking old savegames. We can add new jobs, items, monsters and weapons to 0.9.1, but we can’t easily overhaul the terrain generation there. So this is something we’ve got to get right before the update releases. We’re not merely making some adjustments to change the terrain a bit, we’re reworking and optimizing the way the system works to the core.
That reworked system is now capable of rendering pretty nice terrains and the results can be seen in this blog! It’s very much work in progress though, it should look quite different in a couple of weeks.
”Threat-shifters”
In previous versions of CS, the amount of monsters that assaulted your colony every night was purely determined by the amount of colonists living in your colony. In 0.9.0, these colonists generate only a small amount of “threat”, and most “threat” is generated by unlocking certain important technologies in the tech tree. This makes it a lot easier and more rewarding to recruit large amounts of colonists.
When you start a new outpost, this threat is divided proportionally according to the amount of colonists living there. So imagine there is a total of 1000 threat. If the main colony has 200 colonists, and the outpost has 50 inhabitants, the main colony gets 4/5th = 800 of the threat, and the outpost gets 200 of the threat.
When you expand the outpost until it also has 200 inhabitants, the threat is equally divided: 500 for the main colony, 500 for the outpost. This means the amount of monsters appearing at the gates of the main colony actually decreases!
Work-in-progress "monster attraction statues"
Once I playtested this, I instantly noticed how 'relieving' my outpost was for my colony. It lost some threat, and its defenses were overwhelmed by monsters a lot less frequently. Which leads to the thought of pushing this further. What if I build a dedicated fortress, one that doesn't contain hundreds of colonists which all need to farm the fields surrounding the place, with only one heavily defended entrance, and lead the monsters there?
But that would require building a basement filled to the brim with colonists... Unless, you actually turn this into an item! We’ve added some kind of “statues” that attract monsters. Instead of having to recruit a bunch of colonists in your fortress to get the attention of monsters, you can place these objects to instantly shift a part of the total threat to that outpost. This opens up a lot of new possibilities!
NPC-models
While Zun is programming the new terrain generator, I'm working on new models for the NPCs. These aren't in-game yet; we're striving to release the beta first.
Most of the textured objects in Colony Survival are 1x1x1 blocks. That allows us to make square textures relatively easily. Currently, CS contains one way more complicated, textured 3D-object: “Harry”.
Harry is the internal name for our NPC model. Harry is used for colonists, monsters and players. Harry has a lot of small surfaces, and the way to transfer textures to all these surfaces is to use a “UV map”. A UV map is basically a relationship between specific areas on a 3D-model, and specific areas on a flat, square image.
Harry's colonist texture
That makes it a lot harder to make textures for Harry, than to make textures for square blocks. So for over five years, we basically ignored Harry - oops! We’ve added textures for new blocks, we added new 3D objects that were vertex painted, but we didn’t touch Harry. Harry became a scary, complicated mess of old texturing and animating techniques that we didn’t want to break, so we left it alone.
Until now. I’ve been working on making new, vertex-painted models for both colonists and monsters, and I’ve been animating them. Vertex-painting is the technique that we’ve used on for example the banner since 2017, and a bit later we started to use that technique to create non-block-shaped job spots.
A problem I noticed when test-playing the 0.9.0 devbuild, is the indistinguishability of different monster types. We introduced some new monsters with huge amounts of HP, and currently, the only way to recognize them is by eye colour. Which I have a hard time remembering, and which is difficult to notice in a glance from a distance!
Vertex-painted alternative
Giving them a new texture on the Harry model is also difficult. But with the new vertex-painted NPC models, it’s a lot easier! And instead of merely repainting them, I can also adjust the 3D model itself. This makes it a lot easier to add multiple monster types that are properly distinguishable, which also opens up more gameplay possibilities. We can’t add deeper variation in the combat if the variation isn’t clear to players.
Beta
Zun's making good progress on terrain generation, and when that’s finished, we can start opening the beta! We’re fairly certain that the next blog will contain instructions on how to join the beta and get access to the 0.9.0 dev build :D
Since forever, designing content for Colony Survival has had a major issue.
If you’re designing a regular first-person shooter, puzzle game or story-driven experience, you can just add more. Another level, a new map, a new puzzle to solve. This is a pretty straightforward way to add content.
But in Colony Survival, your colony occupies a static location. And your colonists automatically execute your orders, 24/7. The goal is expansion, and you use expansion to solve your problems.
We can’t just add another level. And every difficulty we add will be taken care of automatically once you’ve added the appropriate jobs. Of course, every new project should exceed previous ones. New food ought to be more nutritious, new luxury items ought to be more valuable, new weapons ought to be more powerful. This results in the following hypothetical graph.
A challenge for a 100 man colony is easy solved by a 200 man colony, whose problems are easily outproduced by a 300 man colony, etcetera. And this means that relatively quickly, players arrive at an unsatisfying point, where all in-game goals are beaten thoroughly. All science has been unlocked, all upgrades have been purchased, all monsters are beaten.
At that point, expansion is still possible. You can try to go for 1000 colonists, and there is a decent amount of fun in that goal, but it doesn’t have an in-game purpose anymore.
A trapfixer/sapper reloading multiple dropper traps
The entire structure of 0.9.0 has been set up to fight that. Crafting has been slowed down, monsters are tied to scientific unlocks and will overwhelm small colonies, you’ll need lots of colonists to produce items for export, outposts need to be built, etcetera.
Previously, we’ve rearranged the tech tree and added new content to our dev-build so that we could test the new features. That worked well for smaller tests, but we still reached the end relatively quickly. In the past month, we’ve been expanding the content in our internal dev-build. We’ve added new unlocks, new jobs and new items.
A hemp farmer
We’ve expanded on a new type of job. We had already added the trapfixer, which might be renamed to ‘sapper’ thanks to Melker500’s suggestion. You place a ‘jobspot’ for this type of job, and the colonist will move to nearby traps to load and reload them with ammo.
We decided we could reuse this for other new jobs. So we’ve added a researcher who requires nearby bookcases, allowing players to build custom libraries. We’ve also added a poison farmer who harvests nearby poison plants. These types of jobs allow players much more flexibility in their designs, and are more interesting than standard jobblock-type jobs.
A library and one researcher
The new content takes place between the Iron Age and the arrival of gunpowder in Europe, roughly 1AD and 1300AD. This era contains a period commonly called the “Dark Ages”. How do we fit high productivity, expansion and growth into the Dark Ages?
Well, writing and studying texts seems to have been a common and extremely labour-intensive practice in the ‘Dark Ages’. Having to build a large scriptorium, allowing many colonists to dedicate themselves to these practices, seems to be a historically realistic feature. We can also fit it neatly into the requirements for in-game scientific unlocks - like the alchemist and the poison guard. Also, scientific notes and books aren’t one-time items, they can sensibly stay relevant in the rest of the game.
Medieval monks at work, source is medievalfragments.wordpress.com
Of course, items like paper for books require their own production chains. We’ve added papermaker jobs, and hemp farmers. The hemp gets used in items like ropes as well.
Don’t worry, we’re not constraining ourselves by striving to be perfectly historically accurate :) Wherever we need to be unrealistic to improve gameplay, we do so. But we feel that keeping an eye on reality makes things both more fun, easier to play and easier to design. Keeping track of production chains is a lot more intuitive when they’re sensible. Things just ‘fit’ better when there is an underlying realness to them.
Alchemist at work
After spending the past weeks making new recipes, icons and meshes, this week I could finally test the new content in-game. It has been a lot of fun! It's fitting together really well. In a very intuitive manner, I expanded to nearly 400 colonists before I even started mining iron. This makes the game feel completely different. Everything happens on a larger scale now, and you really need to plan your buildings and pathways very well, if you want to keep a clear overview of your production.
The content that was added in recent weeks is roughly 70% of the content we'd like to add before the beta is ready for release. The other main feature that needs to be finished before beta release is the enhanced terrain generation. This still needs multiple weeks of work. We're getting very close!
It’s been a while since the last Friday Blog, and a lot longer since the last released update. This has resulted in some questions. It seems it’s the right moment for a summary of our progress! We’d like to divide that summary into three parts:
Things that are finished
Things that still need to be done before we can release the public beta
Things that need to happen between the release of the beta and the definitive, public release of 0.9.0
I.) Things That Are Finished
Outposts An improved version of the multiple-colonies idea from 0.7.0. New colonies were very much separated, requiring players to complete a separate tech tree and to start over nearly completely from scratch. If you wanted to bring items from colony A to colony B, you had to navigate a tedious trading UI.
Outposts are the opposite. While they are physically in a different place, they are deeply connected with the main colony, automatically. They share scientific unlocks, and they automatically store items in, and take items from, the same stockpile as the main colony. They’re not intended for distant exotic biomes - they’re intended to allow you to colonise and utilise “the other side of the river”.
We believe the multiple-colonies idea from 0.7.0 to have failed somewhat. The systems were too convoluted to result in long-term engaging gameplay. We’re hopeful that Outposts in 0.9.0 will fix that!
From Points to the as of yet unnamed ‘Currency’ Instead of giving items to colonists for Colony Points, spendable on upgrades in a specific UI, 0.9.0 has ‘Currency’, earned by selling items to a merchant. This currency can then be used to purchase items at that same merchant. This gives players more control, compared to the automatic distribution of meals and items that happens in 0.8, and it gives us a realistic way to give players access to “outside” items. In all previous versions of Colony Survival, the focus was on producing everything by yourself. In 0.9.0, you will be able to import vital goods and resources from the (distant, not visitable) ‘outside world’.
This combines well with the Outposts. Vital resources can be restricted to locations like mountain tops and fens, and don’t have to be directly accessible for your main colony. You will be able to purchase those resources, and later on you can build Outposts in these other locations to harvest those resources directly.
Traps Static blocks that automatically attack monsters that walk in front, on top or below them. We’ve already got multiple varieties, and want to add some more. These blocks have to be reloaded by a colonist working a job currently called the “trap fixer”. During the day, they wander around their job spot reloading nearby traps. We’re strongly considering re-using this mechanic to allow people to build for example custom, functional libraries.
Enhanced Crafting In all previous versions of Colony Survival, there were some tight restrictions on crafting. Producing any item couldn’t cost more than 15 seconds, and the crafting time was determined per job, not per recipe. This means that in 0.8, all recipes at a single job necessarily share the same crafting time. A bullet and a gun cost equal time to make.
Both restrictions are gone. So the bullet can cost 10 seconds to craft, while crafting a gun could cost 5 minutes. This allows us to make things a lot more realistic and sensible, it allows us to remove ‘filler ingredients’ like copper parts & copper nails, and we can use it to encourage people to build bigger colonies and recruit more colonists.
Threat from Science The amount of monsters that spawn per night, the ‘threat level’, was previously completely determined by the amount of colonists currently in your colony. This worked well to scale the threat with your progress, but it also disincentivized that very progress! It encouraged players to “min-max”, to make sure that every colonist was optimally efficient. It made the game very easy for experts who were good at that, and it made the game very difficult for newcomers who were running less efficient colonies.
This has been changed completely. The threat level now mostly increases due to certain big steps in the tech tree. Instead of rewarding min-maxing, we want to reward players who expand, who build big colonies filled with colonists.
Tool System Most workers now need tools to do their job. These tools eventually degrade, and workers will have to visit the ‘tool shop’ to grab new ones. There are multiple different types of tools with varying effects on crafting speed and durability. The most primitive jobs can’t use the most advanced tools, and some advanced tools don’t function with primitive tools.
Completely New and Restructured Jobs, Items and Tech Tree With all these changes to core gameplay mechanics the old items and recipes have become very outdated. We want to take advantage of all the new possibilities, and we’re doing that by completely restructuring the tech tree and adding lots of new jobs and items. We’re now working with an “Age Format”. Currently, there is content from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.
Elevators / People Movers We’ve added infrastructure which players can use to move themselves to other locations quickly. Building the infrastructure is quite costly. We’ve also enhanced gliders. Their previous incarnation was a bit weird and glitchy. It required players to do a vertical take-off, and then switch to gliding. The new glider is a lot more sensible: you build it on top of a roof, cliff or tower and when you enter it, it’s launched forward with some speed.
”Misc” Many, many small things have been fixed and improved. The save format has been replaced with a SQLite database, which scales better, fixes some problems and helps prepare for cloud saving. Multithreading has been improved. Unity has been updated from the 2019 edition to the 2021 edition. NPC rendering has been redone, allowing for more animations and different NPC types more easily.
Most jobs that worked in “invisible squares” now have actual meshes as job blocks. NPCs are way less likely to walk on top of their job blocks. The negative impact of torches on performance has been halved. Monsters now keep existing when reloading or restarting the game.
II.) To-Do-List before Beta Release
Late-game Content Currently, 0.8 content like the printing press and matchlock guns isn’t in our dev build anymore. The 0.9 beta should cover at least all time periods that 0.8 did. The content that is currently in 0.9 ends rather abruptly, and that should become a nice transition to the later ages, from the invention of gunpowder to the mass adoption of the printing press. We’re currently specifying all the necessary recipes, new jobs and scientific unlocks.
Terrain Generator Changes The 0.9 content is planned with a new map in mind. Instead of enormous ‘tiles’ with other resources hidden in very distant other tiles, the ‘rare resources’ should be distributed much closer to the spawn. We want to use features like heaths and fens for that. Realistically, they occur relatively frequently and a bit ‘randomly’ in temperate regions. They are easily recognizable, and they will hold unique resources like coal ore and sulphur.
Changing the terrain generator makes older savegames unusable, so we want to finish that before releasing the beta.
III.) To-Do-List before Public Release
More Distinctive Monsters All monsters look quite alike, both in 0.8 and in the 0.9 dev build. We want to create new meshes for them so they’re easier to tell apart, and to more properly signify differences in strength and capabilities.
Finalize the UI Quite some new features currently have rudimentary work-in-progress interfaces. These are obviously not release-ready and need to be improved.
Incorporate Beta Feedback We don’t know how you’ll feel about the beta and what you’ll encounter. We’ll probably need to balance some recipes and better clarify certain games in-game, based on your feedback. Perhaps we even need to alter, remove or add certain features. We’ll have to see!
We hope this overview helps you understand our current position in the development cycle! Update 0.9 is a massive undertaking that pretty much deserves the title Colony Survival II, but we want to release it as a free update to everybody who has been supporting us during this Early Access journey. We can’t wait to see your reactions and want to release the update as soon as possible, but we also want to make sure the update meets stringent quality standards. We’re changing and removing some deeply ingrained systems and content, and we only want to release that publicly when we are 100% certain that 99% of the community considers the new content and systems at least 1.5 times as good as the old ones!
Friday Blog 217 - The Old Elevator Is Dead, Long Live The New Elevator!
The last blog was quite controversial! We were very happy with the elevators, but they received quite some criticism. Two main points appeared:
The teleportation between stations is stupid, you need to actually be physically transported from A to B
Elevators aren’t historically accurate
The first problem has been solved! When you enter an elevator, you are attached to it (comparable to the glider) and together you travel towards your destination, completely removing the teleportation aspect.
The second problem needs some nuancing. Elevators are not meant for relatively small Bronze Age colonies that were started two hours ago. It’s more of an end goal, for large and advanced colonies that are nearing the Renaissance Age. It has an iron frame because producing it is intended to consume large amounts of iron.
With the elevator implemented, it was relatively easy to port this functionality to horizontal elevators. They are explicitly not trains: they can only travel in straight lines and they can’t go up or down or navigate corners. But combined with elevators and gliders, they should simultaneously present a rewarding goal for large colonies, and a practical means of navigating between outposts.
(For those who understandably haven’t read all blogs: we’ve implemented an Outpost Feature, allowing players to easily start nearby colonies that share the stockpile and science of the main colony. It’s a bit similar to the multiple colonies from 0.7.0, but without all the tedious problems of having to start from scratch / having to set up complex UI trading rules / having to travel excruciating distances by foot)
We’ve also overhauled the glider. Instead of being a VTOL motorised plane with difficult controls, it’s now a way more intuitive device which actually glides. Players will now place a permanent Glider Launcher, which is able to launch a glider everytime the player approaches it. Of course, the best place to do so is on top of a large tower or hill - which you’ll be able to scale quickly with the help of an elevator. Here’s a video of the full system in action:
https://youtu.be/K3i80CEm-Z0 This might seem like a feature that is not connected to the core of 0.9.0, but it is. Colony Survival is all about growing and expanding your colony, but it needs to have a purpose. And it needs to be something more unique, more ‘physical’, than merely repetitive new items with even higher numbers. The game isn’t fun if it’s an endless cycle of “Monster with 100,000 HP appeared, unlock your 100,000 damage weapon now! Oh no, a monster with 1,000,000 HP appeared!”.
The later ages need to unlock new features that change the way you play and the way you build your colony. And these things need to sensibly require advanced technology and lots of colonists. Simultaneously, we also need better ways to navigate between Outposts, which are a crucial part of 0.9.0 and a significantly cheaper way to access precious resources.
We think the Elevators and Glider Launchers fit these criteria perfectly. I’m working on filling in the rest of the tech tree and re-integrating content like the muskets and the printing press. We’re strongly looking forward to testing it and hopefully being able to open up the beta before Spring is over.
Zun had a brilliant idea this week. We need some kind of transport between colonies and their outposts. It’s a lot shorter than the distance between main colonies and the distant biomes in 0.7.0 / 0.8.0, but some alternative to walking would still be nice. And it would be great if it actually involves some building.
We’ve got the glider, but there are quite some complaints about the controls of it. And it doesn’t really make sense that the glider actually has an invisible engine, and can take off vertically and then just accelerate.
But we also don’t want to spend weeks and weeks working on a complex transport mechanic, postponing the release even further.
A demonstration of what using elevators currently looks like: https://youtu.be/N-UaudIhhaM So he suggested elevators. They don’t actually move in-game, for now. Nor do colonists use them. But if you build a connected elevator shaft with two “entrances”, you can “teleport” between the entrances. This has all kinds of purposes, but Zun simultaneously suggested removing the “engine” from the glider. In 0.9.0, it should only… glide, as its name suggests. That means you’ve got to build a tower to launch it from, and that tower can be climbed quickly with the new elevator mechanic!
Of course, stone age societies don’t suddenly build a functioning elevator out of wood and rock. It’s unlocked later in the tech tree, and producing a piece of elevator shaft is pretty expensive. It should be a significant goal.
The basics of the feature only took a day to develop. We’re planning to add an even more expensive horizontal variant as well. It won’t be able to twist and turn, so you’ll have to build it in a straight line from A to B. So building a “horizontal elevator” should take quite some effort, especially if you want it to look a bit nice, with bridges and tunnels. But the end result would basically be a local, specific ‘teleporter’.
We had an idea for 0.7.0, the update from 2019. We wanted to let you expand throughout the world and give purpose to some exploration. We wanted to make travelling relevant. But it didn’t turn out exactly as we liked. Lots of 0.7.0 features worked quite well, but the distant colonies were really distant, hard to set up and quite irrelevant to the core of the game.
We’re now correcting our mistakes. The original vision is still appealing, but it needs to be better. Outposts are a lot easier to set up, due to them sharing both the stockpile and science with the main colony. They will be useful to the main colony without having to be very distant. Travelling between them shouldn’t be tedious, and there should be interesting and challenging ways to build infrastructure between them. We think we're close to achieving that, and that should make the system function a lot better than it did in 0.7/0.8.
Combined with all the other changes in 0.9.0, we’re highly excited about the “new” Colony Survival. We hope to be able to open up the beta to a broad group of testers in the Spring, and we’re planning for a full release of 0.9.0 in the Summer. We hope we don’t have to postpone that release date - that would cost us our holiday ;)
Two weeks ago, we shared the news of the death of our cat Lizzy, the source of the “Liz” part in Pipliz. We received an enormous amount of supportive reactions. We couldn’t respond to all of them personally, but I do read them all. We’re deeply touched and grateful for your support.
Friday Blog 215 - The Cat Who Has Given Her Name To Half This Company Died
The new mudbricks-block, and new textures for the old planks-block
Two weeks ago, we wrote about Zun’s extensive beta-testing. It resulted in a long list of issues, some bigger, some smaller, and we’ve been working hard to fix these issues.
New logs texture
A general issue was the lack of building material. I had focused my own tests mainly on new content and new features: tools, traps, the overhauled tech tree. I built simple colonies with walls of planks and beds in the open air. Zun has a more sophisticated approach, but that made him quite bothered by the lack of available building materials other than endless planks.
A new dirt texture that is actually distinct from logs!
I had added ‘mudbricks’ as a new cheap building material, suitable for the early ages (stone age, copper age, bronze age). While it was available in the tech tree and it could be crafted by colonists, I hadn’t bothered to add an actual texture… I hadn’t actually made new textures for ‘full’ blocks, with normal maps and height maps etcetera, in years. New jobblocks always use a mesh, and they don’t require traditional 1x1x1 textures. I was a bit worried that I would have a hard time getting back into my old workflow, and had postponed the problem.
An experiment that will probably not be in the final release, and the old planks texture
When actually trying to make the new mudbricks texture, it quickly turned out things were a lot better than I had feared! Texturing went pretty well, and I noticed that I might actually be able to significantly improve on the older textures. I regularly shared my results in #general on Discord, resulting in interesting discussions that helped to improve the final result. Thanks Boneidle, Bog, PatateNouille, Ardandal and all the others who shared their feedback and suggestions!
Lizzy
Lizzy was born in 2006 and quickly adopted by our family. She was smart, careful, graceful and a bit anxious. She was present during a large part of our lives. She has given us enormous amounts of joy, and we hope to have done the same for her.
Last year, she started developing some medical problems. We cared for her as best as we could, but her condition slowly deteriorated. Yesterday evening, she started to have major difficulty breathing. We took her to the veterinarian. She decided that euthanasia was the least bad remaining option. Lizzy was put to sleep and she quickly passed.
Today, we buried Lizzy.
We have one other cat: Pip. Our company is named after both cats: Pipliz. It will remain so eternally.
She is loved tremendously.
22-03-2006 - 03-03-2022
2014
Pip and Lizzy together
2019
Friday Blog 214 - Deep Testing
Some new meshes
Zun has been extensively testing the internal 0.9.0 dev build. He too is very happy with the new features and overhauled tech tree! At its core, 0.9.0 is much improved compared to the public 0.8 version. But, before we open up the dev build to a wider audience, we’re going to need a bunch of refinement.
One of the sore spots is the UI. New features often received ugly, bare-bones, rudimentary UIs. They’re useful for testing, but not intuitive and clear. Some older features, like distributing luxury meals, have been scrapped, but their UI is still lingering around and making things confusing. We’re working on fixing that up.
We’ve continued to convert “UI-jobs” into “item-jobs”. What that means, is that instead of using the command tool to place a glowy outline which attracts a worker, you’ve actually got to produce a ‘physical’ item which summons a worker to perform its job. We’ve had ‘cube-blocks’, 1x1x1 cubes which attract a worker to work next to the item, but we’ve now got jobs where the mesh is actually standing on the same block as the worker. For example, the water gatherer is now summoned by physically placing a special bucket-like item on a block, and the water gatherer will then work on top of that block, standing next to the visible buckets.
[Note: we've actually had "colonists working in the same 1x1 area as the mesh" before! The 2015 Greenlight build had it for both miners and guards, and 0.1.0 still had it for archers. That changed later in 2017]
There are a lot of small adjustments we want to make to the tech tree due to Zun’s test. Some examples. Zun quickly recruited a lot of colonists without advancing much in the tech tree. He hit the 100-colonist-limit, and needs 250 ColonyCoins (WIP-name) to increase that limit. Problem: the default ColonyCoin limit is 100, and has to be expanded by building and placing lockboxes.
They can only be built by the engineer, which required some more tech tree unlocking by Zun, but that was hard to do while unable to recruit new colonists. Zun managed to solve the problem by rearranging existing workers, but relatively new players shouldn’t be expected to solve a complex issue like that at the start. We’re planning to fix it by adding the lockbox recipe to the blacksmith at his anvil, which is unlocked significantly earlier than the engineer. We might also make the first colonist-limit-upgrade cheaper than the ColonyCoins-limit.
0.9.0 focuses a lot on the Stone > Copper > Bronze > Iron transition, with each material being more efficient, with Bronze being very expensive but also very powerful and durable, while Iron is cheaper, less amazing but more cost-efficient. Bronze initially requires the purchase of tin, which is very costly.
I wanted to make bronze “continuously important”, so it’s used in expendable items: ammo and tools. But this can become very confusing for players who don’t know exactly how all the mechanics and production streams work. They want to craft something important and permanent from bronze, like a jobblock, but all the rare and expensive bronze ingots they’ve got immediately get turned into bronze tools or bronze bolts, which are instantly distributed or fired away. It also means that guards which rely on bronze ammo are unreliable: if you don't buy tin, they become useless. We’re considering removing expendable bronze items entirely, but are still weighing alternatives.
At first, traps were unlocked in the Iron Age. We wanted to introduce this feature earlier, so you can now build dropper traps in the Copper Age. They have to be built above monsters, which is hard to do at scale without building narrow mazes. As a replacement for disposable bronze ammo for guards, Zun suggested bronze traps that shoot to the side. That makes it a lot easier to hit monsters, and doesn’t require players to continuously purchase tin: the ammo wouldn’t need bronze.
We’re working on dozens of small and medium-sized issues like this, and we’ll believe they’ll make 0.9.0 much more intuitive. When that’s done, we’ll start expanding the beta.
An example of a small portion of all the things-to-fix we encountered
Before the full, public release, there are some content/feature things we’d still to add. The Mission System and an improved Notification System should help a lot to introduce players to 0.9.0 and the game in general, and to better manage their much larger colonies and outposts. We’d also like to expand the Iron Age and add some extra ages to make full use of the outpost system and to have a serious challenge for advanced players. With all main features already introduced and functional, adding more content shouldn’t be too hard.
This week, I’ve been test-playing the latest internal dev-build. Zun has just completed his newest feature: outposts! Back in November, we came up with that idea and the reaction from players was overwhelmingly positive.
I’ve now been able to try it out, and I don't want to exaggerate, but it truly is a lot of fun! This is what 0.7.0 should have been like. It’s way more fun to build a path towards a mountaintop and start a local mine there, than to have to fly for multiple kilometres towards a colony that is unconnected in all dimensions.
The outposts share their tech tree and their stockpile with the main colony. This makes it a lot less cumbersome to ‘restart’. You don’t have to start over from scratch, you don’t have to use tedious UI to send over some beds and food and ammo, you can just continue with your resources from the main colony.
In all previous versions of Colony Survival, only the area within your green safe zone was useful and productive. You could ignore most of the world as irrelevant. It was merely scenery. But with the outpost-feature, you start to look at the world very differently. That flat stretch of land on the other side of the river could be a great farming outpost. The forest on the other side of your colony could become a source of logs, planks and firewood. Etcetera, etcetera.
We’re going to enhance the world generation to take advantage of this new feature. What areas, what resources, can we add in the main temperate ‘spawn biome’, that will incentivize players to build all kinds of diverse outposts? We’re still working that out.
Zun and Vobbert have not played the 0.9.0 dev build yet. We’re getting very close to the moment where the dev build is sufficiently playable for a genuinely enjoyable long-term playthrough, without using cheats or commands to fix work-in-progress problems. I hope we’ll get there next week or the week after that. That version will still have quite a lot of work-in-progress-UI that is not ready for release. We're trying to streamline gameplay first, and when that's all working as intended we can design the final UI.
Then Zun and Vobbert will playtest it, fully aware of all the things that are still unfinished, and they’ll probably find some serious problems that need to be fixed ASAP. When that’s done, we hope to open up the beta to the first batch of testers. There are still multiple features and changes that we want to implement before 0.9.0 can become the main public branch of CS, and development on that will happen simultaneously to the first beta tests. But it’s always good to get feedback from beta testers relatively early!
It’s the last day and the last blog of 2021! We want to start out by thanking all of you for your support and your patience. We’ve released zero public updates to Colony Survival this year, and despite that, there’s still plenty of activity in the comments, on the Discord and in the surveys. That’s very motivating! Thanks to everyone who purchased Colony Survival: we’re very grateful that we can be dedicated to its development full-time. And thanks to the modders, the server hosts, the translators and all others who are helping us improve CS!
Despite the lack of updates to CS in 2021, a lot has changed behind the scenes. Our current dev build has new core mechanics, major changes to the gameplay, and lots of new jobs and items. It has been a productive year. We would’ve loved to release a steady stream of small updates instead of one mega-big-update, but sadly, we cannot. If 0.8.0 is a decent, finished, regular car, the current 0.9.0 dev build is a streamlined sports car with a race engine, three tires, no brakes, no radio and no air-conditioning. We believe the end result will exceed 0.8.0 in all dimensions, the current work-in-progress has some impressive new features, but it’s also such a massive overhaul that it’s currently just significantly less complete than 0.8.0.
We couldn’t have planned it otherwise. Everything is so interrelated: the jobs & and the tech tree, the jobs & the world generation, the tech tree & monsters & traps, all the new changes & the interface… When you change one thing, all the related things have to be adapted as well. We don’t treat Colony Survival as a sandbox game with wildly disconnected features: it ought to be one coherent experience where you follow the tech tree from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution.
Animal Husbandry
This feature was proposed way back in 2017, but we never actually implemented it. Due to the longer crafting times, 0.9.0 was getting quite heavily dependent on ‘regular jobblocks’, which means a lot of colonists standing next to randomly placed cubes. We were looking for a way to add some more ‘non-jobblock’ production to balance things out. Instead of just putting more emphasis on regular miners/farmers/fishers, we were looking for something completely new.
After a while, we came back to the animal husbandry idea. You’d have colonists actually caring for cows and/or sheep and/or goats. We’re unsure about the precise implementation, and it’s highly related to the dilemma above: should we delay 0.9.0 even further and add animal husbandry to it as well? Should we release 0.9.0 with an animal-husbandry-sized gap and add it in 0.9.1? Should we release 0.9.0 without that gap and then try to squeeze it in in a later update anyway? We’d love to have your opinion on that! Let us know in the comments or on Discord.
The Covid Situation
Everybody is probably tired of thinking about this, but this seems like the right place to mention it for a bit. The past two years have been weird. We've had multiple periods of shops/events/gatherings/schools being limited, hospitals nearing capacity etc. There were some times where we had to digest quite some new information to properly grasp the situation, which took some time and effort. Earlier on this all slowed down development a bit, but over time it's mostly back on pace as the situation has become more known, vaccines & treatments have become available, and generally we got more used to it. Hopefully 2022 will be calmer (knocking on wood!).
2022
Though we expect 2022 to be calmer in terms of COVID, we expect it to be a lot more exciting in terms of Colony Survival! We’re really looking forward to releasing 0.9.0. It’s going to be the biggest update CS has ever seen. It should both improve core mechanics and extend the gameplay with a lot of new content. The Yogscast often worked on the goal of recruiting 1000 colonists, but this was a stretch goal way beyond ‘regular gameplay’. We hope to make reaching 1000 colonists a sensible and expected part of completing the tech tree!
Thanks for being a part of the CS community, and we want to wish all of you a very Happy New Year :D
While testing my colony in the 0.9.0 dev build, I noticed that I had a hard time producing bronze and iron. To construct the kilns and bloomeries needed to expand iron production, some bronze is needed. Instead of the bronze ending up in the new jobblocks, it was quickly converted into bronze tools, which were soon taken by colonists. I did want some bronze tools in my inventory, for science unlocks and as ingredients in certain crafting recipes, so I did not want to reduce my bronze tool production to 0. I wanted to tell my colonists not to use the bronze tools as tools.
But I couldn’t. Zun and I had discussed this issue earlier, and we couldn’t come to a satisfying conclusion. I was imagining an interface where you could adjust the tool-priorities of your workers, and where you could change these preferences per job category. For example, gunsmiths should take the best tool available, while berry farmers should only take bronze/iron tools if copper/stone tools are not available.
We had a hard time converting this idea into a proper UI that is actually intuitive to use. After renewed efforts we settled on a different idea. A simple interface that determines a global limit for all colonists. The limit determines the amount of tools, per type of tool, that colonists will leave untouched in your stockpile (except when they need them as ingredients in a crafting recipe). By default this is something like 3, while the default production limit is higher, resulting in a continuous flow of tool production and tool use. But if you want to save your bronze/iron/steel, you can adjust these limits and force colonists to use other tools.
Where to put this menu? We could’ve put it into the colony menu, among a lot of other interfaces. But we found a solution: a “tool distribution table”. An actual in-game item that has to be placed in the world, and where colonists physically go to collect new tools. Walk up to it and click on it to activate its menu, and that’s where you can adjust the tool limits. We think this is more immersive and fun than one big colony menu with dozens of different functions hidden behind all kinds of buttons and links.
Before this new item, colonists automatically received new tools. This made the entire process very opaque. When they go to the tool distribution table, you’ll actually see an icon of the tool they’re grabbing. This makes it a lot easier to see what’s happening. We’re planning to do the same with the ‘grocery store’, the table where colonists collect their meals. 0.8.0 just shows a generic icon, we’re planning to display the actual meal that’s being grabbed there.
We decided to do the same with the statistics menu. We added a new in-game item, the Statistics Board, which can be placed in the world and can be clicked on to access the statistics UI. It’s still accessible in the traditional way, but we’re considering removing that entirely. Decluttering the UI will probably help to make the game more accessible to newcomers. We’d love to have your opinion. Is it good to connect UI elements to ‘physical’ in-game items wherever that makes sense, allowing you to build some kind of in-game HQ, or should the entire interface be collected and accessible in one abstract UI-space?
We made another change to make things more “real” and less UI-based. Colony Survival 0.1.0 released with quiver-items that needed to be placed in the world to recruit archers. With the addition of new guard types in 0.4.0, that was changed to abstract colored squares. We’ve got plans to add new guard types, but didn’t want a massive spreadsheet-menu, so we’ve converted that back to the old actual-item-gameplay. Here’s the metal rack that crossbow guards use to store their bolts:
We’ve heard some players ask for a more ‘living’ world, instead of a mechanical colony of robot-slaves. It doesn’t seem viable for us to develop super realistic human-like models with complex, unique animations for all their actions, nor are we able to add deep conversations with colonists, but we hope that a lot of relatively small changes like the ones above help to make the game feel more immersive.
The Future of the World
Colony Survival 0.1.0 was released with a big temperate biome in the middle - the place where you spawn and where pretty much all players built their colonies. Far to the north was an arctic biome, and the tropics were in the south. They had zero impact on gameplay.
0.7.0 changed that. It added a New World in the west and a Far East in an obvious location, and it gave players the possibility to start a second, separate colony in these distant biomes, with new tech trees and new resources.
We loved the idea, but we were a bit disappointed in practice. It’s an interesting challenge for some, but the physical distance and the complete separation of colonies, only remedied by a trader with a cumbersome UI, makes it quite unappealing to many. Completing the tech tree in the original temperate biome is, in practice, the end of the game for most players. The content in the distant biomes is also quite artificial: things like potato farms and rice farms are only possible once you’ve crossed an arbitrary, invisible straight line on the world map.
The outposts-idea hopefully fixes these issues. Both their stockpile and their tech tree should be merged with the main colony, and they should be buildable relatively close to the main colony as well.
Currently, everything in a biome is possible in every location in that biome. All ores spawn everywhere, all farms can be built in one place. But we’re looking to change that up. Gold ore spawns everywhere in 0.8.0, but can only be purchased at the new Colony-Currency-trader in 0.9.0. What if it only spawns high in the mountains? Your main colony will be near water in a fertile valley, but building a mining outpost on top of a mountain, the only place to mine gold, sounds like an interesting challenge. Of course, the gold ore (and other fundamental but rare resources) will stay available at the 'currency-trader'.
So we want to make the temperate spawn-biome more diverse and interesting. That could happen with for example unique ores in the mountains, fens where coal can be mined or heathlands as the only place to gather silica sand for glass blowing. That will probably also result in a way bigger temperate biome.
This might result in a disappearance of the tropics, the far east and the new world, at least in the way they’re currently structured. Would you mind the loss of this content, in return for more content in the temperate biome and an earlier release of 0.9.0? Or should we put effort into maintaining the ‘distant content’? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!
